Positions and Magnitudes
lp6916 Mar 25, 2002
Greetings All
I would like to run a few things past readers that may or may not
have been highlighted before.
1. Does anyone see value in having a feature in Guide that marks or
plots a position input as RA and Dec? In other words when a new
comet or nova is discovered, you input the coordinates and Guide
centres on the position and highlights that spot by a cross, mark or
whatever that can be printed out. This is done on other packages (eg
Deep Space) but I don't know if it can be done in Guide. If there
are mutiple positions for a new comet then these can be added and
displayed. I don't think the "User Object Menu" does this. This
feature would be extremely helpful as at the moment with new
discoveries I print out the page and plot the position by hand (using
Guide's positions on the screen).
2. The other thing that I have raised privately with Bill is for
Guide to display VT magnitudes for Tycho stars as opposed to Johnson
V mags. For all the comet observers out there, you will know that VT
mags are preferred over the Johnson V for visual comet photometry.
Certainly from my experience VT displays more closely what the eye
sees and this was also confirmed by Dan Green in a previous edition
of the International Comet Quarterly. The best source of comparison
stars for comet observing is the 'TK' ICQ code which is VT mags from
the Tycho-2 catalogue. At the moment, I make an estimate using the
Johnson V's but then change as required once I've displayed data on
the particular star and seen what the VT mag is (it normally is
always fainter than Johnson V). It's a bit time consuming and I
would love to have the option of displaying either Johnson V or VT
mags. Whether this can be done Bill, I'm not sure!
Anyway I would appreciate feedback from any other users.
Regards
Andrew Pearce